Mother’s Day Reflections, 2006

A sermon offered at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Lafayette, Indiana

On May 14^th 2006

By Reverend Hilary Landau Krivchenia

It rolls around every year –one of the most challenging holidays – at least for me.  But once – long before it became the commercial holiday we know – once Mother’s Day had real meaning.  Anna Jarvis – a young wife and mother from Appalachia organized mother’s work days to provide better sanitation. She continued through the Civil War to provide for men serving on both sides.  After the Civil War she worked on another kind of clean up – that of helping neighbors who had been split Union and Confederate in the Civil War – to find reconciliation. Meanwhile, Julia Ward Howe – a Unitarian -- had written the words of the Battle Hymn of the Republic to honor the Civil War – but when she saw the terrible carnage of war she wrote to the government protesting her own lyrics as celebrating violence.  In 1870 she published the Mother’s Day proclamation in dissent of that violence.  She exhorted women to engage in the political sphere and to shape history – not simply to weep over it or clean up after it. In her proclamation she said: “We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies.”

            Julia Ward Howe’s Mother’s Day was a radical idea – that mothers – who had no legal rights to their own children in that day – should have a claim to those children and a voice in public policy.  Later Anna Jarvis’ daughter – Anna Jarvis – devoted herself to turning Mother’s Day into a national holiday to honor the cause of peace, on behalf of mothers whose sons were taken off to war to kill one another.  After the holiday was officially declared in 1914 by Woodrow Wilson it rapidly devolved into the commercial confection of froth and mythical femininity we know today and even Anna Jarvis, the younger, herself, launched a protest of the holiday.

            Today the original message is pretty much lost and all that remains is a day on which all around us the notion of motherhood – a very personal hood outside the world of politics is promoted and marketed.  Use your mind’s eye for a moment and see what images come to you when you think of that word - Motherhood. When I was pregnant, finally, at age 38, I decorated my eagerly awaited child’s room with white eyelet and fairy pictures – froth.  I hadn’t grown up in a home which gave me much to go on – my mother was anything but the crooning angel on a greeting card.

Mother’s Day has become a holiday in which, as a society, we pretend that all women are – more or less – the same, all mothers are – more or less – the same, that women are intended to be mothers, and that mother’s day is a uniformly sentimental time in which we either praise our dear nurturing, gentle mothers or mourn our dear but departed mothers.  That’s as may be for many people but for many Mother’s Day – is a reminder of more complex things:  Sometimes it is a reminder of the loss of hoped for children, of children mourned, a reminder of pregnancies which ended early by mishap or chance or ones that came too often, too soon, unlooked for, or forced.  Mother’s day is a reminder of mothers whose hands may have been rough with care, or rough through anger, or absent.  Mother’s Day touches each of us ways as complex as our histories of mothering or being mothered.  Mother’s Day is as far from the realities of motherhood as that lovely bedroom I made for Chava was from what it’s taken to raise her.  She never once slept in that lovely crib – though I once took her picture there just as a joke.  The reality of motherhood is that – one way or another – through a legal journey of a million miles and aching hopes or through the aching physical labor and unbelievable drama of childbirth – mothering is messy. 

Mother’s Day is tricky – especially, now, when retailers and sundry jewelers have to be careful to tug women back to a romanticized picture of motherhood without reminding them that for most of history – even in the present , around the world – if truth be told – motherhood alone has been the measure of the value of a woman.  There’s been little room in the world – east or west, north or south for women who were not mothers and less use for mothers who were not wives.  To fail to be fruitful and multiply was a gross failing.  Sometimes worse was to be fruitful and produce only daughters. 

I took up reading historical novels in high school and I became fascinated with Tudor and Stuart England and then shocked by the corruption of Henry the 8^th who simply discarded wives for failing to produce proper heirs.  What a thin coat of civility overlaid his public attempts to look proper as he made up fresh reasons for the divorce, estrangement or execution of each wife!  In order to justify his royal sexism he actually began a church of his own – so that some so-called moral stamp could be put upon his actions.

When the English descended in their hordes upon India they were shocked to find that Hindu wives were sometimes burnt to death on the funeral pyres of their husbands – the practice of sati. That seemed barbaric to the English who had simply burned witches and beheaded women who failed at motherhood.  Sati was largely forced upon wives who had not borne children.  It was a way to dispose of someone who was going to be an economic burden on society and the family.  The wife’s best hope for survival was to produce children, preferably sons and pretty darn quick.  But the practice of sati was encoded into religion at least as early as the 1^st century of the common era when the Hindu law book – Vishnu Smriti declared that “the duties of a woman (are) ... After the death of her husband, to preserve her chastity, or to ascend the pile after him.” In all likelihood I would opt for chastity – but what a choice!

 Just as the groundwork for sati was laid in the most ancient scriptural past, so the ground work for Henry the 8^th’s sexism was laid ages before when the Bible laid original sin at the feet of women.  Mathilda Jocelyn Gage referred to this as making woman the scapegoat for the sins of humanity – and this has surely been true – from witch-killing, to blaming unwed mothers, to – well the list goes on.  As I study the Bible I become more rather than less convinced of the guilt of religion in the suffering and oppression of women.  The scriptural basis only grew worse as chapter after chapter of the Bible rejected the woman considered “barren” as unworthy, described women offering their maids to their husbands that they might have sons, and often listed only the sons when cataloguing the generations – in Genesis you can read the names of the sons of Rachel and Leah and the names of the sons of their maids – all by one father – Jacob.  And then along came Paul – named by some saint – who, in a book that was mysteriously chosen and crowned by Clement in the first century or Irenaeus in the second as divinely inspired, condemned women to be silent in the church and subservient to their husbands at home. Gage put it well in 1893 when she wrote:

“The most important struggle in the history of the church is that of woman for liberty of thought.... Holding as its chief tenet a belief in the inherent wickedness of woman, the originator of sin, as its sequence the sacrifice of a God becoming necessary, the church has treated her as alone under a "curse" for whose enforcement it declared itself the divine instrument. The church has ever invoked the "old covenant" as authority… Paul, whose character as persecutor was not changed when he veered from Judaism to Christianity, gave to the church a lever long enough to reach down through eighteen centuries in opposition to woman's equality with man. ...” 

I have tried – really I have – I read all the feminists and I wanted to think that they were wrong – or perhaps putting the case too strongly – but I think, after all, after theological school, after the Jesus Seminar, after John Shelby Spong, Peter Gomes, Karen Armstrong, Elaine Pagels and the ongoing great list of modern biblical commentators,  and after sitting in Bible study with members of this congregation, with our small and radical Bible group this year I am more convinced than ever of two things – the first is that the church father’s who chose, edited, and compiled the scriptures in the Bible we now know chose in large degree, those texts that would support the subordination of women, rather than the radical equality I suspect that Jesus was actually a symbol of.  And second I am convinced that women’s very lives are at risk in the face of unquestioned faith and at the hands of church fathers.  I wish it were otherwise – I want to feel conciliatory and peacemaking and on other days of the year – I suspect that I can and will – but just now, just today – in thinking about the role of religion in the creation of womanhood and motherhood I rather stand shoulder to shoulder with Elizabeth Cady Stanton who said: “The church is a terrible engine of oppression, especially as concerns women.”

I read the line of inheritance from Eve to Sarah to Rachel and Leah and Ruth lying at the feet of Boaz until Mary.  In the original Greek the word for Mary’s state before the conception of Jesus was that of maiden or young girl.  Not virgin – that was a third or fourth century invention of the church fathers – who wanted to keep the taint of women’s sexuality from ever touching Jesus in any way.  In fact, over time, the church fathers even invented the idea that between Mary and Joseph there never was a consummation of marriage but that she lived a died a virgin so that Jesus could live and die pure of sexuality.  And to set the impossible example for women that women be both virginal and motherly, without will and without bodily desires, without independent vision or fate. 

Over time, in stronger and stronger measure the dogmas of religion developed to define women in terms of a role – of servant to man and mother of the race – and nothing other than that.  Over time women have been – as was Mary, disconnected from – not entitled to her own body – a vessel used out of her control.  Over time women have been both confined to and dislocated from our bodies, our powerful, creative, ability to feel, to bleed, to embrace, to desire, and to refuse.  We have been defined by our religiously prescribed role as bodies and denied, by religiously proscribed rules – the ownership of our bodies.  Of course, there have been generations of women who have struggled against this – I suspect that many of them died as witches – particularly midwives and healers – women who gave women back access to their own bodies.  We have been the victim – too often the silent victims of what Barbara Ehrenreich calls: theopolitical bigotry.  I think that fits – theo as in theology or theocracy and political – so that we don’t forget that theology and politics hold hands in unholy wedlock. 

So when I think of Mother’s Day I am more likely to think of the exceptions rather than the rule – of the ones who are unseen and unheard. 

This has been the doing of traditional religion.  Stanton and her friend Susan B. Anthony were allies who agreed on many radical ideas, but even they had disagreements.  In 1890 Susan wrote Liz, “You say that women must be emancipated from their superstitions before enfranchisement will be of any benefit and I say just the reverse, that women must be enfranchised before they can be emancipated from their superstitions.”

And it was into this atmosphere of both disenfranchisement and superstition that, in the late 19^th century, a Catholic woman named Anne Purcell Higgins died of motherhood.  Giving birth to 11 children had worn her body out – as it had the bodies of unnumbered women through history.  The difference between Anne Higgins and all those other women was that she had given birth – to a brilliant, compassionate, strong, and focused girl – one Margaret who was 20 at the time her mother died.  As though to bring her mother back to life she went into nursing – helping women whose lives had been devoured by poverty and the unending cycle of pregnancy, childbirth, childrearing, and loss. She visited, as a nurse, time after time, young women dying in childbed, girls ravaged by syphilis, and children dying of poverty and neglect – less than one hundred years ago.  As Stanton and Anthony were fighting to get women the vote Margaret Sanger was fighting to emancipate women’s bodies.  In her work with the poor she could see that ignorance and lack of social options made women particularly vulnerable to abuse and exploitation and that information about birth control was a vital key to freeing women from the prison of compulsory motherhood.  Motherhood they did not choose and could not prevent.  She wrote: “I saw that the women of wealth obtain this information with little difficulty, while the working man's wife must continue to bring children into the world she could not feed or clothe, or else resort to an abortion.”  She was arrested for spreading such information – which was illegal at the time – as family planning was illegal.  Margaret Sanger had a terrible shortsightedness when it came to matters of race and it limited the strength and compassion of her arguments for freedom for women’s bodies. 

At the same time, Margaret Sanger understood in the clear light of experience, reason, and compassion, that sex education and birth control were the real ways of preventing abortion.  It remains true today.  I have watched as young people have passed through our sexuality education program – Our Whole Lives – and it has made them more conscious, less prone to rush out see what all the fuss is about (they learned about it), more likely to wait to have sex, much less likely to get pregnant, and therefore less likely to ever need an abortion.  Abortion is not the issue – in a society that disdains the body – which is a true miracle of nature and life, that forces women to choose between work and home, hides the sexual aggression of men and boys, denies the need for good information, and puts minimal value on childcare, education, and healthcare the real issue is the assault of religion and state upon women and their right to control their bodies and destinies.

I want Mother’s day to be a day of real celebration.  Many years ago I called my mother to wish her a happy mother’s day – a momentary ignorance.  She hated the holiday so much that she told me that she was very disappointed at my call and had told a friend that we did not engage in such sentimental claptrap.  While I might have wished for a slightly more tender parent (I have one in my father), I’ve come to agree with her in many ways.  I certainly came to understand that motherhood was not a choice as they say – in those days – it was simply pushed and expected.  As a young feminist I could begin to imagine the forces that were at work on my mother in the 1950’s as brilliant women were being vilified and pushed into the home she was pushing into the university.

  Margaret Sanger said “Woman must not accept; she must challenge. She must not be awed by that which has been built up around her; she must reverence that woman in her which struggles for expression.”  So I invite us all to celebrate a more real Mother’s and among the things we mourn and celebrate that we honor the capacity but not the necessity of women to be mothers and to stand even more as witnesses for the free agency of woman.

On Mother’s Day I mourn the pressures that push children into the arms of unwilling mothers, I mourn the children and I mourn the mothers.  I celebrate every woman who chooses in love and without coercion and I celebrate my own children – all of whom I have by choice.

Let this be a day of celebrating that children are chosen – or at least that they may be welcome surprises.  That women have control of their own bodies, that they know their options, that support exists for mothers to raise their children and provide a living, that health care exists for every child and adult, that more men learn to respect the bodies, voices, and choices of women, and that superstition, fearful belief, and ancient creed will not dictate the choices of women – but that science, reason, and compassion will empower women to act in the best interests of all life.  It does not matter whether you are for abortion or against it – it’s a smoke screen, a scare issue.  For the same people who, by and large, block a woman’s right to choose do also uphold those ancient books as their natural science and their matters of unproven belief as their authority and strength. They would as soon return all women to that former degraded position so that again women would serve as the scapegoats for the sins of the world. 

I invite us, as a reasoned faith – speak, as I did last week, as the voice of reason and compassion in religion. To remind our society and the world of value of human life over ideas, of women’s bodies over dogma, of this world over any imagined, better world.  Sanger also said: When motherhood becomes the fruit of a deep yearning, not the result of ignorance or accident, its children will become the foundation of a new race.     

This be my Mother’s Day wish – my wish on this day and all others – for the freedom of women, the love of children, and the promise of our own real and better world.